Her car glides around the bend and suddenly the colours change. The light sky is swallowed by a darker cover and the yellow fields of barley and oats become bottle green and mud brown: land for livestock, not crops. A flooded field shines silver: a reflection of the slate-grey sky, the sun gleaming through the […]

Amanda caught the first tube into work every morning. It was sometimes hard getting up in the dark and not seeing sunlight until lunchtime, but the alternative was unthinkable. There was only ever a handful of other people on the platform. The regular five. A nightshift-dishevelled man, resigned to missing the day again, a tracksuited […]

The old car door closed with its usual bang and she looked along the road. Charlotte was surprised, briefly, by the sight of only two cars along the seafront. She got out the notebook, already bent at the edges and slightly damp from being in the door of the car. She hadn’t planned to use […]

Joanna’s mother figured out she was pregnant before Joanna mustered the courage to tell her, and after kicking Joanna around the house, she kicked her out. Joanna had been working as a cashier at the Food Lion for about six months by that point, and had recently bought herself a rusted old Camry, so when […]

Anwar leaves his house looking the coolest I’ve ever seen him, and that’s saying something. He’s in the year above the rest of us. When he got serious about studying after Easter, we had to stop gigging. We’ve been rehearsing with a drum machine app since then, which isn’t nearly as good. He’s almost got […]

Holly Sykes is a writer and a secondary school teacher of English. Having taught in London for ten years, she is now back in the north-west where she grew up. For one day each week, when she is not teaching in a school on the Wirral, she sits in a quiet room with a blanket […]

J. Cavanagh is a short fiction writer with an interest in place, isolation and the uncanny. She was a full-time teacher for many years and has worked in schools in Liverpool, London and Guernsey. In 2014, she decided to return to education herself, graduating two years later from the MA Writer/Teacher programme at Goldsmiths, University […]

Taylor Gordon is a fiction writer from Georgia who holds her MFA from the University of Wyoming. She is a ghost story aficionado with a sea monster obsession. When she is not writing, she can usually be found painting landscapes, kneading bread dough, or going off in search of transformative experiences. She has published short […]

Rue Baldry lives in Yorkshire, Great Britain. She has a BA in English Literature from York University and an MA in Creative Writing from Leeds University. In 2015 she was a Jerwood/Arvon mentee and, in 2017, The Bridge Awards’ Emerging Writer. Her short stories have been published in journals such as Ambit, Mslexia, The Honest […]

Fiachra Kelleher is a final year undergraduate student at Trinity College, Dublin. He is from Cork. Fiachra is currently working on short stories for his undergraduate dissertation. His fiction has appeared in The Three Lamps, The Cormorant and Orca.   Q: If you could travel back in time, which of the great writers would you […]